Winter vortex

We are in the wintry Midwest and even the spacing of the opening titles looks desolate. The swell of Carter Burwell’s score as a car makes it over a rise in a blizzard briefly invokes the western—later on certain transitional cues will echo Bernard Herrmann’s music for Taxi Driver (1976)—but Fargo (1995) is very much a ’90s crime film, a semi-rural neo-noir where violence and humiliation is played for laughs. Most crime films of the ’90s seemed pitched as black comedies, so it’s no wonder that the Coen Brothers cemented their prominence in that decade, collecting Academy Awards while prompting a critical backlash that’s never quite abated. It’s been noted ad nauseam that the Coens don’t display the appropriate amount of love for their characters, whatever that means, and indeed Fargo often seems in the grips of a cruel hand, its motley criminals mined for amusement while dangling on the hook that’ll ultimately flay them. But Fargo also has one of the most iconoclastic heroines in the movies. Like most of the film’s small town Minnesotans, Brainerd Police Chief Margie Olmstead-Gunderson (Frances McDormand, brilliant and totally at ease) speaks with sunny amiability and an accent or cadence, generously peppered with those “ya, ya”s that harken back to the region’s Swedish heritage, that begs to be taken for naïve if not moronic by urban sophisticates. But Margie, who doesn’t even enter the film until it’s a third over, proves herself a well of humble intelligence and know-how. She is a chipper, very pregnant, female Colombo, and near-impossible not to love.

The rest of Fargo’s personage are easy to loathe and, in keeping with noir fatalism, speak to some fundamental, inescapable corruption at the core of everything. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy, a vivid, nuanced cartoon), a car salesman drowning in financial ruin of his own doing, arranges the kidnapping of his own wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrüd), by far the film’s crudest character, played mostly as hysterical but whose terror I find too awful to giggle at. Even Jerry’s adolescent son understands how things can go horribly wrong—maybe he’s been watching Coen Brothers films? Jerry hears about a pair of crooks named Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi, groomed as John Waters if John Waters bought his clothes at flea markets) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare, convincingly disaffected) from Shep Proudfoot (Steve Reevis, in a steely, explosive cameo), a Native American mechanic with a fraught past. Carl is a babbling sociopath, while Gaear barely speaks, perhaps because he spends all of his time holding vigil for the first opportunity to kill an innocent bystander. What kind of idiot would trust these two with his wife?

Greed and stupidity constitute the twin engines of Fargo, which is ostensibly based on a true story, though some of its narrative masterstrokes—i.e.: the emergence of a man named Mike Yanagita, or an extensive conversation between two parkas—must surely the product of the skewed imaginations of the authors, Minnesotans both. Theirs is a cold and nasty world—no country for old men or pregnant women—in which people like Margie seem the minority. That final scene: Margie, who’s just seen a man shoved into a wood chipper with a 2x4, who’s two months away from giving birth, snuggles with Norm (John Carroll Lynch, endearingly sedated), whose painting has just been selected for a measly three-cent stamp, and warmly urges him to look on the bright side of things. It’s not exactly a happy ending, but in the Coens’ filmography it’s about as happy as things usually get. 

                   

Small Town Murder Songs: This town ain't big enough

Ed Gass-Donnelly’s feature debut deposits an okey-dokey sheriff with a murky past and capacity for mayhem in the rural Mennonite community of Conestoga Lake, Ontario, whose vast prairies render every passing pedestrian vulnerable to the wrath of God. Walter (Peter Stormare) is bear-like, middle-aged, his rage bottled and sealed by an exterior that could be mistaken for timidity if you didn’t know him, the spectacle frames so outdated they’d be hip in the city, that goofy uncle moustache. If Walter were more articulate, or overtly sinister, or nursing an urge for secret refinement and solitude punctuated by violent sex, Small Town Murder Songs’s particular thread of portentousness—squeezing each scene for tension and regularly injecting thundering music over the soundtrack, the film’s almost a mediation on portentousness—would seem heavily indebted to Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 or The Killer Inside Me, but Gass-Donnelly is chasing something at once more diminutive, or short story-like, and more mythical. You develop this cumulative awareness of there being less to all this than is intended, the emphasis clearly more on the director’s stylistic moxie than on probing the psychic depths of its troubled protagonist. And in an industry as starved for personal style as Canada’s, this emphasis will probably work in Gass-Donnelly’s favour.

Walter attempts to find religion all over again, primarily through the love of a good, nattering, matronly waitress (Martha Plimpton). His redemption is interrupted by the discovery of a young woman’s body. The investigation leads him back to his much sexier and trashier old flame (Jill Hennessey) and has him discreetly pointing an accusatory finger at the douche bag who constitutes her current beau. What’s most intriguing about all this is the notion that just because you’ve got a vendetta doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

With conspicuous references to basic instincts and intermediary passages riddled with copious slow-motion, wailing dirges that declare “You can’t hide what you are,” and mammoth titles chiseled into the sky by the Lord reading “REPENT AND PROFESS YOUR FAITH,” you can’t exactly call Small Town Murder Songs subtle, but it’s too enamoured with allusion, repeats its flashbacks too often to retain their needed enigma, and, in short, writes a lot of cheques it can’t cash. Those titular musical refrains, all of them elegantly composed and judiciously edited (Brendan Steacy’s the shooter, Gass-Donnelly his own cutter), are clearly the bedrock of Gass-Donnelly’s conceptual gambit, but they’re so consistently overwrought that only an apocalyptic shower of fireballs could give them their due send-off.

The gleam of pretentiousness cast over much of Small Town Murder Songs never extends however to the performances. Stormare, so rarely granted this sort of role, is tremendous, seemingly never caught without a precise notion of Walter’s shifting emotional levels, and as brooding with his bulky physicality as with his face. Plimpton completely fills out her role without ever resorting to too much gesture or false nuance. She has a remarkably convincing scene where she needs to pray while thinking of the dead girl’s panties. Hennessey’s perfectly cast and groomed here, but has little to do. If her character were given more attention we might have gleaned some sense of what she and Walter were really all about, and since, as the real object of his desire, she’s finally the key to our understanding of Walter’s dark side, her absence is felt that much greater. The undernourishment of Hennessey’s role points to the central question that lingers with anyone trying to reckon with Small Town Murder Songs. It’s very hard to know if this needed a lot more to make it truly resonate, or a lot less—even at a meager 75 minutes, there are scenes that feel superfluous. Boil it down to music videos and you might find its true raison d’être. Extend and seriously deepen it and you might find a satisfying slice of Canadian gothic.

Small Town Murder Songs opens in Toronto and Edmonton this weekend.